Wednesday, September 2, 2009

VirtualBox 3.0.6 BETA 1

Sun has quietly released VirtualBox 3.0.6 BETA 1. The list of changes is quite long and many outstanding issues were addressed.

The good news for the VirtualBox Web Console is that with VirtualBox 3.0.6 BETA 1, it actually becomes usable. The architecture of the Web Console was pushing the VirtualBox Python API to its limits and quite a few issues were detected. Often, event processing got stuck and you had to kill and restart VirtualBox. Luckily, all those issues got fixed in the development version of VirtualBox (called 3.0.51 but not recommended for general use) and now also applied to the stable 3.0 series.

The VirtualBox developers also addressed one important feature request from the Web Console project: automatic RDP port assignment. When running multiple virtual machines on a host, each VM has to bind to a different port for its RDP functionality. With the old API, this was difficult to accomplish. Basically the Web Console would have had to scan ports and find a free port, assign the port to the VM and then hope that the VM could actually bind to the port. The new API allows the Web Console to specify a whole range of ports (even multiple ranges) and the RDP server will try all of those ports and bind to the first available.

If you've been following the Web Console project, you've seen that various bits and pieces got added and that there is steady progress. Still a lot of work to do so no big announcements yet. Once the basic functionality is there and VirtualBox 3.0.6 leaves the beta phase, we're planning to make a public announcement.

PS: The VirtualBox Web Console project is still looking for contributors! Join the Developer Mailing List, check out the code and see what you can contribute!

I tried VirtualBox 3.0.6 BETA 1. when it was just released and it really disappointed me, I got many annoying errors so what I did was to wait for another release to see if those errors were fixed and they were fortunately!